Plum Pie by P. G. Wodehouse Page A

citizens during his three years of office. It includes insecticides, detergents, laundry bleaches, chalk and charcoal (washed down with ink) and lighter fluid. I have never actually attended any of these Detroit parties, but the picture I conjure up is of a sort of Dickens Christmas, the detergent bowl circulating freely and the air ringing with merry cries of "Don't spare the shoe-polish, Percy" and "After you with the insecticide, George". And the extraordinary thing is that the revellers seem to thrive on the stuff. The rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes to be seen in Detroit would reach, if placed end to end, for miles and miles and miles.
     
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    Good news for those who want rabbits' ears to droop limply instead of sticking up as they do at present comes from the New York Heart Association, whose Doctor Lewis Thomas has discovered that all you have to do is inject enzyme-papain into the rabbit. The Association chaps are pretty pleased about it, but in my opinion too easily pleased. It is all very well to go slapping Doctor Lewis Thomas on the back and standing him drinks, but when all the smoke has cleared away, what has he got? Merely a rabbit from whose ears the starch has been removed. If he likes that sort of rabbit, well and good, and I have nothing to say. But I think children and nervous people should be warned in case they meet one accidentally.
     
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    And now let us take a quick glance at the cat situation in Tennessee. We learn that Mrs. Chester Missey of Knoxville in that state had put some towels in her automatic clothes dryer the other day when she was called to the telephone. She had not been talking long before a suspicion floated into her mind that something was amiss.
    "I glanced at the dryer," she told reporters, "and saw this white thing going around inside. I knew I hadn't put anything white in there, just brown towels."
    So she opened the door, and there was her cat Murphy doing, like a South American republic. sixty revolutions to the minute. It is pleasant to be able to record that after five minutes, during which he was getting back his breath, Murphy was "just as alive as he can be"—which, if you know Tennessee cats, is saying a lot.
     

3. Sticky Wicket at Blandings
     
     
     
    It was a beautiful afternoon. The sky was blue, the sun yellow, butterflies flitted, birds tooted, bees buzzed and, to cut a long story short, all Nature smiled. But on Lord Emsworth's younger son Freddie Threepwood, as he sat in his sports model car at the front door of Blandings Castle, a fine Alsatian dog at his side, these excellent weather conditions made little impression. He was thinking of dog biscuits.
    Freddie was only an occasional visitor at the castle these days. Some years before, he had married the charming daughter of Mr. Donaldson of Donaldson's Dog Joy, the organization whose aim it is to keep the American dog one hundred per cent red-blooded by supplying it with wholesome and nourishing biscuits, and had gone off to Long Island City, U.S.A., to work for the firm. He was in England now because his father-in-law, anxious to extend Dog Joy's sphere of influence, had sent him back there to see what he could do in the Way of increasing sales in the island kingdom. Aggie, his wife, had accompanied him, but after a week or so had found life at Blandings too quiet for her and had left for the French Riviera. The arrangement was that at the conclusion of. his English campaign Freddie should join her there.
    He was drying his left ear, on which the Alsatian had just bestowed a moist caress, when there came down the front steps a small, dapper elderly gentleman with  a  black-rimmed monocle in his eye. This was that notable figure of London's Bohemia, his Uncle Galahad, at whom the world of the theatre, the racecourse and the livelier type of restaurant had been pointing with pride for years. He greeted him cordially. To his sisters Constance, Julia, Dora and Hermione Gaily might be a blot on the